The Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory comprises the results of an extensive peer survey. This comprehensive guide to legal talent in Canada identifies both leading lawyers and law firms from across the country.

The Lexpert CCCA Corporate Counsel Directory & Yearbook is a joint endeavour of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association and Lexpert. It provides the most extensive listing of corporate counsel in Canada.

The 2018 Lexpert Zenith Awards celebrate Mid-Career Excellence. Winners of the Lexpert Zenith Awards will have accomplishments in a Lexpert Practice Area, and a notable contribution in Social Responsibility.

Recent Developments of Importance

The duty to consult and accommodate Aboriginal people when decisions are made that may affect their rights, interests or way of life has become a key principle of Aboriginal law, which has resulted in a large and growing body of law. The Crown has a duty to consult with and accommodate Aboriginal ...

Among the most daunting legal developments for companies doing business in Canada is Canada’s new anti-spam and anti-malware law (CASL), more formally known as the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, most of which came into effect on July 1, 2014. It has extra-territorial effect, applying whenever ...

In asset securitization, a lender packages a pool of financial assets and sells them to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which in turn issues asset-backed securities to investors. The proceeds received by the SPV are used to pay the lender for the pool of assets. Cash flows from the pool (principal ...

Much of the promise in the Canadian life sciences sector is landing in biologics — also known as biopharmaceuticals and distinguished from chemically synthesized drugs by the fact that they are manufactured in, extracted from or synthesized at least in part from biological sources. So much so that ...

As Canada’s class actions regime has evolved over the past 25 years or so, lawyers have been fond of pointing to the swinging pendulum of jurisprudence that shifts its ever-roving eye on the class action battleground.

Practising international arbitration includes advising as to the contractual provisions for arbitration and ADR, advising as to arbitration rules and procedures, and conducting ad hoc arbitrations or arbitration under the rules of arbitration institutions. Arbitration is an alternative to ...

Commodity tax and customs practice encompasses the HST, provincial sales taxes, customs and excise, and related matters. Because the area is so specialized, commodity tax lawyers often practise within the whole range of services, from solicitor-client mandates to advocacy up to and including the ...

Within the short span of nine days in August 2016, Ontario courts managed to add new horizons to the potential liability of defendants in the burgeoning arena of price-fixing conspiracy class actions. Each of the four August cases engaged a separate conspiracy involving LCD panels (Fanshawe v. AU ...

The computer program sections of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) came into force in January 2015. They have been much criticized for their breadth. The main objection is that the provisions regulate all computer programs installed on all computer systems that are part of a commercial activity rather ...

Corporate commercial law, or “business law,” is a broad area that can encompass a number of specialties, such as corporate finance, securities, and insolvency law. Counsel practising corporate commercial law may be involved in any number of matters for clients, including:

As the slumbering IPO market began to stir in 2015, Cara Operations, Shopify and Spin Master all came to market with IPOs offering shares that had different votes and powers than the private owners and management did. These IPOs, and a close shareholder vote at Fairfax Financial, renewed the debate ...

The corporate mid-market embraces transaction work, primarily involving knowledge-based companies, where the transaction size is typical of the Canadian mid-market without regard to the revenues of the entities involved.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2015 decision in Guindon v. Canada concluded that “advisor penalties” found in s. 163.2 of the Income Tax Act are administrative and not penal in nature. The decision is not likely to end the controversy or the litigation surrounding AMPs, whether in the context of the ...

In July 2016, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) proposed a new framework for minimum margin requirements for non-centrally cleared derivatives. The proposals are part of an ongoing effort to make the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market more secure and transparent.

Employment law governs the rights and obligations between individuals and their employers. They arise from the common law in most provinces and the civil law in Québec. Employment lawyers negotiate and draft individual employment contracts; advise as to the obligations that arise from the ...

While every painting, poem, news story, play or movie is at some level made up of entirely unoriginal elements, it is combining these elements into a final product that gives rise to uniqueness and originality. Arguably, approaching copyright by dissecting a work and saying it’s a collection of ...

While the situation is not as grave as it may be in the US, environmental and social risks are proving to be an additional hurdle for Canadian extractive companies squeezed for credit in an economic cycle marked by falling oil and commodity prices.

Even as Canada hustles to play catch-up on the international trade scene through its ongoing pursuit of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) with developed and emerging nations, it faces its first non-NAFTA investment claim and the first BIT claim against it by a developing-country investor.

For the first time in common law Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada has recognized a legal duty to perform contractual obligations honestly and with regard to the legitimate expectations of other parties. The origin of that duty, the Court stated in its 2015 decision in Bhasin v. Hryniew, could be ...

The Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench April, 2016 decision in Geophysical Service Incorporated (GSI) v. Encana Corporation is the first case in the world that has ever found that copyright exists in seismic data. But the decision also held that the existing regulatory regime governing federal lands in ...

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in AIC Limited v. Fischer is best known for the proposition that plaintiffs who have received settlements in regulatory proceedings (in this case, Ontario Securities Commission proceedings) are not necessarily precluded from bringing class actions against the ...

The Canadian Securities Administrators’ amendments to the Canadian take-over bid regime, announced in February 2016 and generally welcomed as bringing certainty to issuers and acquirors after a long consultation process, will dramatically alter processes and strategies in the hostile M&A ...

The Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act, proclaimed in force on June 1, 2015, has been widely lauded for finally bringing Canada up-to-speed with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States in promoting transparency and accountability in the extractive sector by ...

With more than 200 completed and ongoing public-private partnership projects valued at about $75 billion on the books in Canada, public-private partnerships have become increasingly entrenched a way of financing infrastructure projects over the past decade. So much so that several provincial ...

Property Development is a broad practice area that includes real estate financing and development, which covers all aspects of real property transactions, as well as municipal law, which encompasses commercial, retail and residential planning and land use work. Canada’s provincial governments have ...

While commercial leases will vary from agreement to agreement, all leases will contain provisions that aim to protect the rights of the landlord and the tenant. The level of protection provided to each party depends on what is specifically negotiated for in the lease, in addition to the rights that ...

Digital payment mechanisms and processes, of course, lie at the heart of almost all e-commerce. It follows that there is a great deal of interest in what policy makers are going to make of products like electronic wallets and mobile payments. Unfortunately, Canada’s federal government has been late ...

Online behavioral advertising (OBA) has become a popular part of the business model for many organizations. It can also be an intrusion on privacy. The difficulty is that the guidelines governing OBA have not always been clear. Clarity, however, took a giant step forward with the release in April ...